Even Frodo fails. Sam is the hero. Unsung. The books, the movies, both say this. Blatantly. "They'll sing about his faithful gardner."

No. They won't. They'll sing about brave Frodo. Frodo lives. 

Honestly i dont want it.  With extreme power comes constant attack ..  

The whole meta quality of "facing Trumped up charges," is about to go next level.

Sat Jan 09 2021 13:29:30 EST from Nurb432

Honestly i dont want it.  With extreme power comes constant attack ..  

I should read those someday. been meaning to since i was a kid. But i'm more of a scifi kind of person.  Wife bought the DVD set years ago, thinking id like that stuff, but i think its like 12 hours.   

Sat Jan 09 2021 00:09:55 EST from ParanoidDelusions

Even Frodo fails. Sam is the hero. Unsung. The books, the movies, both say this. Blatantly. "They'll sing about his faithful gardner."

No. They won't. They'll sing about brave Frodo. Frodo lives. 

If High Fantasy isn't your thing, don't try and force yourself. But maybe start off with The Hobbit. Jumping right into the Lord of the Rings is a heavy chunk of Fantasy fiction to bite off. 

Honestly - as a genre - most of it misses by a pretty wide margin. LoTR is a classic piece of literature, though.  Also... the movies, you can watch them over a period - you don't have to binge them. But - they're not nearly as good as the books. 

Oddly, the Hobbit is a *terrible* movie franchise. They did all the things wrong with that one. 

Tue Jan 12 2021 12:46:20 EST from Nurb432

I should read those someday. been meaning to since i was a kid. But i'm more of a scifi kind of person.  Wife bought the DVD set years ago, thinking id like that stuff, but i think its like 12 hours.   

 

Problem i have with movies is if it doesn't reach out and grab me in the first 20 mins or so, and i dont binge it, ill never go back and finish the series. has to be a commitment at that time. 

Tue Jan 12 2021 15:23:28 EST from ParanoidDelusions

If High Fantasy isn't your thing, don't try and force yourself. But maybe start off with The Hobbit. Jumping right into the Lord of the Rings is a heavy chunk of Fantasy fiction to bite off. 

Honestly - as a genre - most of it misses by a pretty wide margin. LoTR is a classic piece of literature, though.  Also... the movies, you can watch them over a period - you don't have to binge them. But - they're not nearly as good as the books. 

Oddly, the Hobbit is a *terrible* movie franchise. They did all the things wrong with that one. 

 

Tue Jan 12 2021 12:46:20 EST from Nurb432

I should read those someday. been meaning to since i was a kid. But i'm more of a scifi kind of person.  Wife bought the DVD set years ago, thinking id like that stuff, but i think its like 12 hours.   

 

So, it is important, though it is boring. Shire folk are fat, happy, simple, white suburban folk. They garden, they have little hobbies. They've gt 1st world problems, like nosy in-laws and competition to keep up with the Tooks... but mostly they like to sit around and drink and eat, and occasionally the riskier ones will hang out with a wizard and blow off fireworks and smoke some pipeweed. They lead an idyllic lifestyle, and Jackson wanted to spend a lot of time on establishing that about them. More than the books do, really. Rather than showing, the book really tells you this about them and their lifestyle. 

The book also kind of assumes you got introduced through the Hobbit, so you know a lot of this already. The Hobbit introduces the Shire lifestyle and culture more fully, with the meeting with the dwarves and Gandalf as kind of a bridge... 

In both cases - once you get out of the Shire... things are far less like a quaint English subdivision of ajoined houses full of comfortable englishmen. Quickly. 

It starts slow, then becomes a page turner. 

Tue Jan 12 2021 16:16:58 EST from Nurb432

Problem i have with movies is if it doesn't reach out and grab me in the first 20 mins or so, and i dont binge it, ill never go back and finish the series. has to be a commitment at that time. 

 

Also, there are a lot of characters. Don't try and keep track of all of them. The important ones, you'll come to know. 

I'm surprised they didn't figure out a way to fit Samuel L Jackson in as a motherfuckin' Ranger. 

And maybe have Legolas invent breakdancing. 

The problem with high fantasy as a genre, is there are a lot of tropes and cliches, and a lot of it doesn't hold up well through time. Some of it gets too weird. 

And... it has kind of gotten to the point where metal got, as far as arguing about what genre a piece is in. Is Game of Thrones "high fantasy"? 

It is tied in with the fortunes of AD&D - which has been incredibly diluted because of the 5th edition's popularity with the SJW crowd. Now they're getting so granular they're talking about... 

"Low Fantasy/Low Magic" to "High Fantasy/High Magic"... and even that is twisted from what I'd consider high fantasy... 

By their definition, I think Game of Thrones would be "Low Fantasy/Low Magic". Outside of dragons and wights, there aren't a lot of monsters, adventures, FANTASY. The dwarfs are actual dwarfs - genetic defects, not a distinct race. It is mostly about human politics in a middle-ages type setting. There is one priestess, and one cult of assassins that can assume the face of those they murder. It seems so almost technological, along with other hints throughout the series - that one starts to wonder if it isn't actually a post-apocalyptic story after the collapse of a very advance society on Earth.   

And High Fantasy/High Magic is a cartoon. It is Adventure Time. 

Wed Jan 13 2021 18:06:47 EST from darknetuser

Oddly, the Hobbit is a *terrible* movie franchise. They did all the

things wrong with that one. 

Agreed.

High Fantasy, as a book genre, as plenty of good stuff in it, but also plenty of bad stuff. You need to know which pieces are the good ones or else you risk running into Scott Bakker and having your brain ooze from your ears.


The Hobbit was a nice tale for what it was. A tool for sparkling the imagination of kids with cool heroes, a daunting threat on the land etc etc etc. They turned the movie franchise into a multi-hour-long joke. "Mercenary goblins. No more than a hundred. We can manage." Seriously?

There are more than a few authors/writers who deliberately blur the line between sci-fi and fantasy using exactly that rationale, that an age of magic rose up after an age of science collapsed the society.

Game of Thrones was neither.  That was more like a soft porn soap opera with dress-up costumes.

Game of Thrones is Dallas in Middle Earth - for sure. 

Which is an interesting take on the genre. Far more focus on the daily routine lives of the characters - who are mostly entitled folks trying to navigate power in their society during a time of social upset and conflict. 

They are a society in social and technical decline. They have memories of their society being not unlike it is, but more powerful, with greater technology - and legends of greater magic. They can't explain how the older society did things they are no longer capable of doing, especially in construction engineering. Those feats of construction happened before their history. There is evidence of some sort of cataclysmic event - vast barren wastelands and a cracked moon. The maps of Westeros and Erros are huge - I think they're the Americas and what is left of Africa and Asia - and it is possible that the Earth has tilted on its axis and its orbit has changed, accounting for deep winters that only happen a decade apart or so. 

And it was pretty good, until the last season - and pretty much avoided SJW signaling the entire time. Then the producers thought they got a gig on Star Wars, and decided to wrap it up in 3 shows when it probably had 3 seasons left. 

It was gratuitous about sex. 

But it stuck to the genre reality so well it outraged Cultural Marxists. 

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/06/there-are-no-black-people-on-game-of-thrones-why-is-fantasy-tv-so-white

Thu Jan 14 2021 09:56:34 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

There are more than a few authors/writers who deliberately blur the line between sci-fi and fantasy using exactly that rationale, that an age of magic rose up after an age of science collapsed the society.

Game of Thrones was neither.  That was more like a soft porn soap opera with dress-up costumes.

For the record, The SciFi/Fantasy of Roger Zelanzy's "Chronicles of Amber," is one of my favorite series in this kind of genre. It certainly takes a more "Heavy Metal" approach to mixing in some science and modern with the fantastic elements of the story - but it is well done - and if you want to argue that removes it from High Fantasy - then eventually the Ultima series of CFRPGs does the same thing, basically, and so does The Chronicles of Narnia. 

I don't disagree with you. I'm saying the working definition the 5th Edition kiddos I saw trying to develop basically boils down to that...


That the further the world is from reality, the more HIGH the fantasy is... Older generations are using the word differently.

Like, a HIGH elf would be tinkerbell, a LOW elf would be Legolas - one would totally be out of place in our reality, in our dimension - the other is basically a slender human with pointy ears.


High Fantasy to me really just means it is a low tech, middle ages world with en epic feeling to it. Low fantasy would be the same thing, but with very little "supernatural" going on, if any.

It is a definition drift.

Thu Jan 14 2021 11:25:44 EST from darknetuser

I don't agree that High Fantasy is a cartoon necessarily. There is more to it than D&D merchandise.

Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman wrote a lot of "cartoonish" High Fantasy for D&D franchises - and actually some of that stuff is quite good - but they also have a lot of works that are quite unique in their own right.

Well, and if you get SciFi elements involved, a lot of purists have ALWAYS rejected it from the fantasy genre altogether. So, Dragonriders of Pern - Sci Fi, not fantasy. 

Sat Jan 16 2021 07:26:46 EST from darknetuser

It is a definition drift.

Pretty much.

There is also this tendency to declare that anything that is not heroic / epic / shiny cannot be High Fantasy, which is why I have seen people lump things like the Warhammer setting on the Low Fantasy pile.

For the record, the original Warhammer Fantasy setting has dragons, orcs, demons and evil wizzards popping up from under every rock, in a cruel world that is going to shit blazing fast as the Chaos gods eat it a bite at a time.